Stormy Weather Page 2

  She slipped past the blind man and took the latch of the shed door in both hands and pulled it open. Her father slept on his back atop several bags of coal. His handsome face was slack, his dark hair sprayed across his forehead, and his shirt stained with coal dust. He sounded like something being slaughtered in a lonesome dirty pit.

  She shook his arm and said Daddy several times but he did not wake up. He jerked his arm away from her and thrashed one way and then another on the coal and then started snoring again. She started to cry but crying only made her feel worse. She went back to the blind man.

  She said, “Sir, can you help me get him home?”

  “I don’t know what I could do to help you.” He cleared his throat. “You should wait until morning and some people will come. George Dillard, he owns this place, he’s the blacksmith. He’ll be here about seven.”

  “I have to get him home,” said Jeanine. “My mother will be worried. We don’t have any food or anything. I have to go to school.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m nine. Is there anybody close by that could help me?”

  “Well, if you want to go get the town constable.”

  “No, I better not.”

  She cried noiselessly. Her mother and father were supposed to love each other but they yelled at each other so much, and these things kept happening. Now it was the middle of the night and she was abandoned here in a blacksmith shop with the old Tin Lizzie and the meat going bad in the heat.

  “Well,” he said. “Can you drive?”

  Jeanine wiped her face on her dress. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I could drive. Daddy has let me drive. I think I know where we live.”

  The blind man leaned on his cane. “Do you know how to work the pedals?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know how to start it.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you how.” His fingers wandered up and down the cane like white caterpillars in the dark. “Do everything I say.”

  Jeanine went over to the old Ford and stood waiting for the blind man to tell her what to do.

  “All right, turn on that lever on the tank. That opens the gas line to the engine.”

  She turned the tank lever, and when he told her to, she reached into the driver’s side window and pushed up on a left-hand lever. She found the hand brake and skinned her knuckles setting it.

  “Your dad ought to be jailed,” he said, “for getting drunk and leaving you in the car. There ought to be a law.”

  “Oh no,” said Jeanine. “Don’t tell anybody. I can take him home.”

  “Can you see over the dashboard?”

  “I can!” she said. “It’s easy, I can see over it good.”

  “Turn that coil box key,” he said. “That’s your electrical system.” The fingers of his right hand waved in the air as if they were independent of him or he did not realize he was doing it. “I could take one of them Tin Lizzies apart blind. They won’t let me. I could do it easy.”

  Jeanine turned the coil box key, and then he told her shove up on the lever on the steering wheel that retarded the spark. She turned the key and pressed down with her heel on the starter. The motor purred smoothly, the lights came on and the blind man sat in the beams with a smile on his face. He was illuminated like an actor on a stage.

  Jeanine said, “I got to get him in the backseat.”

  The blind man followed her voice in a slow shuffle, his feet like small boats sprayed aside bow waves of straw and dirt and coal ash. She tried to wake her father and after a while he wobbled upright.

  “Ahhh bullshit,” he said. “Iss juss bullshit.”

  The blind man took Jack Stoddard by the ribs and lifted him.

  “Guide me,” he said. “Hey, girlie, point me at that car.”

  Jeanine took hold of his sleeve and then opened the back passenger-side door and the blind man felt along the rim of the door while he lifted Jack Stoddard through it with surprising strength. She saw her father grope around and claw his way onto the torn upholstery of the rear seat and slump down again saying, “Well what the hell is this? If this isn’t a way to do a fellow.”

  Jeanine said, “Thank you, mister. I sure appreciate it.”

  The blind man walked back toward his chair with sure steps, in an upright posture with his head drawn back, as if he were afraid something might strike him on the chin and as he came to his chair he put out his open, white hand in an elegant gesture, letting it fall until it touched the chair back.

  “Children driving around at night,” he said. “There ain’t words to describe it. He should be arrested.”

  Jeanine climbed in the passenger door. She reached down and took up a heavy twenty-five-pound flour sack and somehow got it onto the driver’s seat and sat down on it so she could see over the dash. The world was now full of obstacles and pieces of metal on the ground that would reach up to pierce one of the narrow tires. She stepped on the pedal and fed gas to the engine and released the brake and drove out of the blacksmith’s yard into the midnight town.

  The streets were paved with brick and the tires made a flubbering noise passing over them. It was a town in the middle of the night, something she had never seen before. The daytime had receded like a tide and left all the buildings comatose, all the signs that said groceries and mexia drugs and barbershop had nobody to speak to. Jeanine passed by one street after another, looking for the sign that said brick yard road, afraid of waking up somebody who would come and arrest her father. If she could just get home she would be all right. The headlights glared back at her from storefront windows and behind those reflections were town constables and sheriffs looking for a nine-year-old girl driving without a license with a drunk daddy in the backseat.

  She came toward the railroad station. A man in a broad western hat stood beside a team of four horses. He was waiting for the train to come and he would load them up and take them away to his ranch. It was Maisie and Jeff and Big Man and Little Man. Her father had sold them that very night. Their pale straw-colored manes and tails were like lifting flax in the midnight glare of the streetlights, they nodded to one another and shifted their enormous feet.

  Jeanine felt that her heart was broken but she dared not try to stop and say good-bye to the team. She felt that they were on their way to some good place and were leaving her behind, it was as if she had been deserted by some roadside. She had not yet passed Brick Yard Road. They lived down that red dirt road somewhere in a two-room rent house alongside other rent houses thrown up at the height of the oil boom and now dwindling back into mere lumber.

  She gritted her teeth and held on to the wheel; the old car wavered down the street. Maybe there was such a thing as stars in the heavens coming down to guide you somewhere and she knew there wasn’t. A dog darted out at the car and peppered the night with explosive barks as he ran alongside. Shut up! Shut up! She leaned out the window and hissed at the dog. For a few moments she felt savage with rage. All her emotions were too big for her.

  The man stepped out of the light of the train station and walked into the headlights and so she jammed at the brake with both feet and killed the engine. He walked up to the driver’s side and bent down to look in, his face in the shadow of his hat brim.

  “You’re Jack Stoddard’s girl,” he said. “What are you doing driving this car? In the middle of the night?” He glanced at the backseat to see her father lying there snoring, so ugly and wasted.

  She said, “Oh, he’ll be all right in the morning!”

  “Where do you live?”

  She held on to the wheel as if she were afraid he would take it away from her.

  “Down Brick Yard Road. Mister, do you know where it is?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Get out so I can drive.”

  She didn’t know if this was worse or better. She could have driven slowly up to the house, she could have killed the engine and glided silently into their littered front yard. She could still fix everything by herself. And maybe he wanted to steal the car.

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p; “I can drive,” she said.

  “You probably can but I am not going to let you.”

  Jeanine got out and stood by the driver’s side, and reached in to turn on the ignition coil for him when he jerked the crank around. He seemed very angry.

  “You’re not allowed to steal my dad’s car,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  She stood on the brick street as he angled his long legs inside. He picked up the sack of flour and dropped it on the floor and seated himself at the wheel.

  “I can turn the crank,” she said. “I’ll turn it for you if it dies again.”

  “Get in,” he said.

  They passed the train station and then went in among the oil rigs that had invaded the very town itself, a dark army marching among the houses and empty lots. The horsehead pumpjacks groaned and sighed with a sound like great warm rocking chairs patiently creaking in the night. With a kind of helpless terror she saw their house and the coal-oil lamp shining in the front window.

  “My mother doesn’t care if I drive,” she said.

  “I’ll wager she cares if you drive home with your dad passed out in the backseat at one o’clock in the morning.”

  Jeanine wiped tears from her eyes, quickly. “They’re going to fight,” she said. “She doesn’t even know he sold our team.”

  Ross Everett started to say something and opened his mouth and then cleared his throat and was silent. When they pulled into the front yard she jumped out of the passenger-side door like a small acrobat. She would tell her mother that her father just now went and fell asleep in the back. Her mother came out onto the front porch. Everett climbed out of the passenger side after her and said good evening to her mother and took off his hat and then put it on again. From the next yard a hen made an interrogative, crawling noise and in the remote distance an airplane bored through the night sky. Jeanine gathered up as many of the brown paper packages of groceries as she could.

  At the last minute she remembered to jerk the sack of flour from the front. It landed on the gas cock and the sack tore open and flour poured out onto the floorboards. Jeanine turned to her mother, standing at the open door with the lamp in her shaking hand.

  “Thank you, Ross,” she said.

  “It’s my fault for keeping him out so late,” said Everett.

  Her mother nodded. “Jeanine, don’t lie for him,” she said. She put the lamp on the step and walked toward her daughter and took her hand. “Just don’t lie for him.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  They shifted out to the Permian Basin in far West Texas when the big Yates field came in. By 1928 the north-central Texas boom had played out and settled down to the sedate business of production. Wells had been driven in whatever place seemed to show even the least promise, including a dry hole on the old Tolliver farm itself. The Tolliver well had been drilled by a producer named D. H. Sullivan who was known as Dry Hole Sullivan. He just kept on drilling one dry hole after another and nobody knew how he managed to raise capital for his hopeless ventures but there’s a sucker born every minute and most of them have at least some cash to part with in order to buy one one-thousandth of one one-thousandth of the price per barrel that might come from a future or nonexistent oil well and generally these people lived in Chicago or Baltimore or someplace like that.

  THEY MOVED INTO a section house in a town called Monahans. The section house had been left there by the Texas and Pacific Railroad and then afterward used as a chicken house. Then during the strike it was rented out to themselves and another family. They each had a room, and the other family asked them to turn up their radio at night so they could all hear KBST out of Big Springs. Broken eggshells littered the corners. Her father drove a saltwater pumper; the producers injected brine into the formations to keep up the pressure when the oil was pulled out. Then her father took to driving nitroglycerin. He drove a brand-new 1929 Ford half-ton with EXPLOSIVES painted down the side in silver letters and in later years Jeanine came to understand that he also delivered bootleg whiskey with this vehicle and got away with it because the various law enforcement agencies did not want to stop him or to get anywhere near him.

  There was no wood to burn in their stove in that remote desert. Coal came in with the tankers that roared into Monahans to take on oil; the coal cars were always at the end of the string next to the caboose. Jeanine and her older sister ran down the line of tankers with buckets to collect coal at five cents the bucket. It was a dirty job and they hated it. They stood and watched in the cold desert mornings with other children as the coal was shoveled out in heaps into the back of coal trucks. It had a slick repellent shine to it. The men shoveling it out onto the trucks could see that some of the children had come to pick up fallen pieces. These were children in thin sweaters and busted shoes, with anxious looks on their faces. The men shoveled big scoop-loads down to them and everyone stood back and let them collect it.

  They learned about the crash of 1929 at the salt well. Jeanine had heard about the salt well and wanted to go see it and one day she said she would go by herself if the others didn’t want to come with her, she would walk along the highway and out into the desert alone. She was not afraid of the empty spaces. She wasn’t afraid to skip school either and she wasn’t afraid of a whipping, since all their mother did was wave a homemade flyswatter at them. Jeanine was eleven now, she had developed a square face and a firm jaw and long gray eyes and dishwater blond hair. She and Mayme and another girl picked up stray pieces of coal that had fallen from the coal cars as they walked. They carried flour bags to collect it. They walked out into the immense flat stretch of the Permian Basin where it stretched without variation like a single note played on a wind instrument, on and on without end. The sunlight shone stark and unforgiving on the twisted brush. The blackbrush and creosote were short and drawn up into wired armatures with brief, hardened leaves.

  They came to the derrick and a wellhead that was gushing salt water. The brine was ancient fossil seawater from two thousand feet below, it spouted into the air like a plume and all around it, the engine shed and the derrick itself and an abandoned car and pieces of rope and broken bailers, tin cans, crushed pipe, severed bolts, loops of cable, all were coated with crystallized salt. The fine crystals gleamed like minute gems and every piece of discarded trash shone like the jewels of the Romanovs.

  Beside the well was a 1927 touring car with a lot of seismographic equipment, but it was turned off and the geophone needles were dead on their pegs. A man sat in the car with a radio on, and a man in chaps sat beside him. The man in the chaps took off his broad hat and wiped his head with a bandana. The salt water roared.

  “Jesus Christ, they’re going down like ninepins.” The men bent forward to the crackling radio. “U.S. Steel and all of them.”

  They said hello to the seismograph man and he said, Good day, girls. Mayme asked what was it that they were listening to on the radio.

  “The stock market has crashed,” said the seismograph man. He turned up the volume. The announcer said that Montgomery Ward was falling from 83 to 50 and Radio was hurtling down headlong from 68 to 44. “Are any of you heavily invested in stocks or bonds?”

  Jeanine said no, they were not.

  “Good. If you do, put your money in oil.”

  “All right,” said Jeanine, brightly.

  Mayme said, “He’s kidding you, wise up.” They talked in this way because they were very young and had seen various movie stars in films, the starlets who were cynical and smart and tossed their heads at everything. They said wise up, and tell it to your old man, and made the fashionable gestures of shrugging and lifting their chins. The girls stood by the car with black hands, holding their coal, listening.

  IT WAS IN June of 1931 that the Lou Della Crim came in outside of Longview, near the Louisiana border. The Lou Della roared up in a gusher that took the drilling pipe out with it and threw the twenty-foot, two-hundred-pound joints of pipe into the air like jackstraws. The blowout of oil hurled a three-con
e roller drill bit the size of an alligator a full two hundred yards. Men ran for their lives. It cost a crew ten days’ labor to shut it down. They had hit the biggest oil pool in the history of the world and it was sweet, high-gravity oil so pure you could almost pour it straight into your gas tank, it was the color of honey. The wildcatter who drilled the discovery well reached the oil-bearing strata with an ancient cable-tool rig and a decrepit wooden derrick and secondhand equipment. The driller and his crew were so broke they were throwing old tires into the steam engine for fuel.

  “There’s going to be some wild times out there,” her father said. “They hit it at only fifteen hundred feet, Liz. It’s coming in at nearly twenty-two thousand barrels a day.”

  Jeanine came to stand by him at the table and peered carefully at the exclamatory headlines of the Longview Daily News. She was shelling peas. Strands of desert wind sang at the top of the stovepipe and her mother read a Hardy Boys book, The Great Airport Mystery, aloud to Bea, on the other side of the table.

  “Those boys are going to need some pipe hauled,” Jeanine said. She tossed a handful of fresh peas into her mouth. Her low, boyish voice made her father laugh so hard he dropped the paper.

  “Listen to the girl,” he said. “Ain’t she a pistol.”

  AND SO THEY left the Permian Basin with great hopes, the summer when Jeanine had just turned thirteen and Mayme was fifteen and Bea was six. Their father bought a Reo Speed Wagon flatbed, and on this they loaded all their possessions and left the desert for East Texas. Jack and Elizabeth and Bea rode in the cab and Mayme and Jeanine rode on the flatbed with their trunks and boxes. They spent six days on the road and had eleven flats. Her father poured Karo syrup into the front tires and it made the inner tubes hold out longer. The terrible drought of the early 1930s had reduced Central and North Texas to a country of hardpan and drift and abandoned farms. They saw other people headed east along with them, loaded with mattresses and chickens and children and washboards tied to the tops of Tin Lizzies, all of them journeying toward the East Texas strike where there was work to be had.